Seriously? Here?

As we traveled from Odessa, TX, to Carlsbad, NM, we stopped and had a wonderfully gas-producing lunch at a little Mexican restaurant in Pecos, TX. Namesake of “Pecos Bill,” that legendary character who shot out stars, occasionally rode mountain lions, and truly loved "Slue-Foot Sue," we found Pecos-the-town to be somewhat less…legendary. It squats, flat as a pancake, in the midst of a desert that could easily be the set for one of those movies where you see some sweaty fool trapped under a relentless sun staggering around whispering “water…water” through his cracked lips until he falls face-down in the dust. ("Cue the buzzards.") Heading north out of town on an endlessly straight, two-lane highway, I found myself glancing up on occasion looking to see if buzzards were circling our own mini-caravan, then back down at the temperature display on the dash…Whew—still 61 degrees. Gotta love towing a trailer through the desert in February!

As we drove on for miles and miles, with sand and cacti galore for scenery, I couldn’t help but envision a family (like ours, in my head) a few hundred years ago who’d risked it all to come to the new world, purchased a wagon to carry their meager possessions, and headed west to settle on their own land. I can imagine the wife (whose voice sounds, not surprisingly, a lot like Nan’s) saying with building intensity as the horses slowed to a stop, “Seriously? Here? We did all this, we came all this way to stop Here? HERE?!!!!”

As I mentioned back in maybe my second blog entry, everywhere we’ll go on our trip, someone calls it home. Including Pecos, TX. And the few people we saw in Pecos seemed right at home. We received lots of pleasant smiles and hellos from people in the Mexican restaurant, suggesting the people there were happy and glad to see us tourists. But still… Why would someone have stopped there, in the era of no air conditioning and no bad TV westerns to romanticize it, and made it home? The heat, the tumbleweeds, the lack of water, the absence of arable land, even the occasional poisonous snake… (“Here?! We’re going to live HERE?!!”)

I’m sure that with thousands of people reading my blog entries, word will get out about these comments and I'll wind up getting some nasty emails from the Pecos Chamber of Commerce and possibly the mayor---assuming the Pony Express can carry emails (rim-shot). But before the Pecosians try and blow sand up my shorts, I have to admit that I’ve asked these same kinds of questions often about my own home of origin--Minnesota. After freezing off various parts of their respective anatomies during that first long winter, why didn’t Laura Ingalls Wilder and family load up the wagon at the earliest sign of spring and head south, thanking God that they survived the cold and were blessed with sense enough to look for a more temperate climate? Whatever the reasons, they stayed put. And so did the citizens of Pecos. They stayed in the desert and to them it became home. So if the chamber of commerce and the mayor want to send me nast-e-grams, I’ll deserve them, because home is wherever you’re from—hot or cold, north or south, sane or not. God bless the people for whom Pecos, Texas, and the desert highway between there and New Mexico, are home.

(Still—Nan’s voice rings in my ears. “Seriously? HERE?” I can imagine myself climbing down from the wagon to survey our new land and Nan quickly grabbing up the reins. “Yah—giddyup” she’d yell, and off she and the kids would go at a gallop, looking for someplace reasonable in which to plant roots. And there I am, running behind yelling “Wait! Wait for me!! AT LEAST DROP A CANTEEN!”)